In the transportation, entertainment and hospitality service industries customer experience is of utmost importance and more often than not it starts with mobile ticketing. These days more and more people expect to travel using only their mobile phone. Studies show that as many as 60-80% or riders will have a smartphone, an increasing number have contactless bank cards.
Mobile ticketing has been around for several years most notably in air travel. You can catch a flight with a mobile boarding pass, but adoption on other modes of transport has been slower. You can plan a train or bus journey and check live departure times on the go but ticketing and indeed boarding or entry still tends to be based on traditional methods – ticket desks, kiosks, paper tickets, or walk-up with correct change.
UK newspaper, The Telegraph, recently reported that paper train tickets could become extinct under plans to allow passengers to tap in and out of UK rail stations. When someone reaches a station, they will simply tap their card or smartphone against a digital “reader” at the barrier.
For large and fixed hubs like train stations or even cinemas investment in ticketing, checking and payment infrastructure is easier to justify but for taxi’s and buses it is far more difficult given the fluidity and mobility of the customers and vehicles.
Mobile is the key enabler to simplifying the fare payment and boarding experience. This goes beyond the smartphone of course and into multi-format ticket readers capable of reading and adapting to a number of technologies – such as Barcode, Bluetooth Low Energy, NFC, and contactless. This versatility at the front-end of the reader must be matched by secure and resilient communications to the cloud hosted back-office systems.
Transportation is not the only beneficiary of mobile ticketing of course.
Pop-up events, which are constantly on the move, can’t always guarantee an internet connection for processing ticket sales. By utilising a mobile ticketing system, you can sell tickets on the door and ensure access to your back-end systems, no matter where you are.
Nationwide coach companies could also benefit from mobile ticketing which will give them the ability to process on-board card sales.
Mobile ticketing could also help large music festivals counteract ticket fraud. With a reliable mobile connection, a system of scanning and checking tickets against a verification system, could help ensure that only valid tickets and their rightful owners are admitted.
Regardless of use case, a secure and reliable connection to the back-office enterprise systems is essential for taking payments and checking tickets.
If you’d like to learn more about making the most of mobile contact us and see how Arkessa’s managed connectivity service can enable and transform how you make use of the mobile internet.